The Inheritance
by mosylu
Summary: She didn't have the easiest childhood. But somebody taught Caitlin Snow how to love, and it wasn't Ronnie Raymond. Written for Flash Ladies Month 2016


(A/N) Written before the S3 premiere

* * *

Caitlin stood in the middle of the living room, hugging her elbows. "I don't understand," she said to the lawyer.

"Your great-aunt left you the house," the lawyer repeated.

"Oh," she said softly.

* * *

Rebecca Weiss had been a computer.

When she was little, Caitlin didn't know that once upon a time, "computer" had been a job title. It was what the women were called - and they were women, in the vast majority - who used pen and paper and slide rule to supply (male) scientists with all the calculations for the atomic bomb, and later for NASA, among other projects.

But with a shaky grasp on history and a shakier grasp on the current state of technology, small Caitlin had firmly believed that her great-aunt was a robot.

She had enjoyed that belief.

Adults were mysterious beings anyway. Who was to say that some of them weren't robots? It was nice to think that somebody, somewhere, had decided that she needed an Aunt Rebecca and had programmed a robot to hug her and feed her cookies and call her "shaineh maidel" while she brushed her hair.

And a robot wasn't subject to illness or calamity. A robot never had to go to the doctor or take pills and pills and pills and pills every day. A robot never slept for days and looked thin and shaky and ill in a hospital bed. If a robot ever broke down, they got fixed and were good as new.

Anybody who watched TV knew that.

She had discovered the truth on the day that her aunt cut her finger badly during a cooking lesson. At the sight of the bright red blood, she'd burst out sobbing, shrieking, a total meltdown somewhere between a temper tantrum and hysterical grief.

With her finger wrapped in a kitchen towel that would never be the same again, Aunt Rebecca had picked her up and crooned to her until she hiccuped herself to silence.

"Now, darling, what was that all about?"

"You're not a robot," Caitlin had whimpered.

When Aunt Rebecca got it figured out, she laughed, but stopped when she saw her great-niece's tear-stained face. She'd explained then that no, she wasn't a robot, but she was made up of bits and pieces like one, and would Caitlin like to see what this so-terrifying blood looked like close up?

She'd pulled out an old microscope and squeezed a drop of the still-seeping blood from her finger onto a slide. While she washed and bandaged her finger, Caitlin was discovering the microscopic world of cells and plasma.

If humans were made up of bits and pieces like a robot, she'd reasoned with her eye pressed to the eyepiece, then humans could be fixed. Made good as new.

* * *

Her aunt had come to every important event from her kindergarten play on up.

"She's an old woman," her mother had said. "She's retired and widowed, with no children of her own. I'm sure it's an excuse to get out of the house. It's nice she's there to bring you home," she'd added thoughtfully.

Caitlin knew better than to ask if her mother was coming. She also knew better than to ask why her mother seemed hell-bent on convincing Caitlin that Aunt Rebecca wasn't coming for her.

She knew from a very young age that her mother couldn't conceive of any reason to do anything that wasn't of direct benefit to herself. She also knew that Aunt Rebecca could.

As she got older, the tune changed to, "You're smart to encourage her. I'm sure she has a lot of money to leave to somebody."

"Mom, that's not why I spend time with her," Caitlin said in one of her brief fits of trying to convince her mother to actually feel something for anybody else. "It's because she's alone and she's always been there for me. Anyway, I don't think she has a lot of money to leave anybody."

Her mother had looked at her as if she were speaking Greek. "Don't you have better things to do, then?"

* * *

Rebecca had lost her husband, Caitlin's great-uncle Merle, in 1961, after only five years of marriage and no children. Though she'd had what she called "gentleman callers," she had never remarried.

When she came to visit Caitlin at college, she would laugh and say, "What a compliment!" when people asked if she was Caitlin's grandmother.

Caitlin would say the same. "What a compliment," she would murmur, sitting in the audience and watching her great-aunt give a lecture on women in STEM before STEM was a buzzword.

* * *

"Aunt Rebecca, I wish you'd reconsider," Caitlin had said to her in a phone call shortly before the particle accelerator had blown a fair chunk of Central City into rubble, and done the same to Caitlin's life. "Ronnie and I would love to have you with us. I worry about you. You're eighty-seven and you still live in that house alone."

"It's my home," she'd said. "I should leave my home? And besides, the last time I lived in a house with a newlywed, I was the other one. It's not half so fun as a third wheel."

"Aunt Rebecca!"

She'd laughed her brassy laugh while Caitlin blushed and Ronnie snickered. He'd truly been ready to welcome her aunt into their home, and truly relieved when she steadfastly refused.

* * *

After the explosion, she'd called every day, even when Caitlin refused to come to the phone and she wound up talking to Cisco for half an hour a day for nearly three weeks.

(One of her very, very few smiles during that time was when Cisco had asked her, with a puzzled look, what a mensch was and whether he was being insulted.)

Eighteen days, twenty-one hours, and sixteen minutes after the explosion, Caitlin had finally taken the call. When she heard her aunt's voice, she'd burst into tears as tempestuous and hysterical as those long-ago tears in her kitchen. "He's gone," she'd sobbed. "He's gone, he's gone, he's gone."

Aunt Rebecca had crooned to her over the phone until she calmed down.

* * *

She regretted terribly that she'd stopped calling as often. It was hard to know what to say.

"So, there's a man who can run faster than sound and I'm his personal doctor."

"So, Ronnie didn't actually die, but now he's merged with another man and they can spontaneously combust without burning and they're on the run from the army, which wants to use them as a weapon."

"So, it turns out my boss is a homicidal maniac. From the future."

"Oh, I'm fine," she said when she did call. "Everything's the same, really. What about you?"

* * *

"So, it turns out that Jay - remember? my new boyfriend? - is actually a megalomaniac from an alternate universe who kidnapped me and locked me up with my evil doppelganger for a day."

She didn't get a chance to say that, because a phone call came to her instead. "I'm so sorry to have to tell you this," said the home care nurse she'd been paying for the last two years. "But I found her this morning. I think it was sometime last night."

"Thank you," she'd said, and hung up, and booked a flight back East as soon as she could.

* * *

Aunt Rebecca had set up everything for her funeral in advance. Even the caterer. Caitlin was the youngest by a clear forty years, and it was after everyone had cleared out that the lawyer had told her what she'd inherited. Which was everything.

Apparently her mother had been right. Although Caitlin had been right too.

"There's not much else besides the house," he said regretfully. "A little money in stocks and bonds. Honestly, it'll probably be eaten up in inheritance taxes."

"That's all right," she said.

"I know you're here from out of town. I can give you the name of a company that specializes in cleaning out houses and preparing them to sell."

She took the card because it would be rude not to, and she was in that numb, floaty stage of grief where manners, rules, and ritual were a framework that told her what to do next.

When he'd gone, she sat down on the couch, took off her shoes, and thought, _This is my house now._

It smelled of flowers and funeral food. She remembered other smells, food smells and the vinegar that her aunt used to mop the floors and her citrus hand lotion.

She hiccuped over her next breath.

This house had been so good to her. So warm, so welcoming, when home had been a cold, careless mother and a father who loved her but was often too ill to focus on anything but his health. ("I wish I could be there, but you understand, Caity" and she would nod yes, she understood, because if she didn't understand how sick she was, she'd be an awful daughter.)

She'd been happy here.

She hiccuped again, then got up and wandered through the house, the wooden floors and linoleum cool under her stocking feet.

She could stay here. In this house. Move back to the town where she'd grown up. Her mother wasn't here any longer, but she considered that an advantage.

She could leave Central City and the memories behind.

Memories of Ronnie.

Of Jay.

Of Thawne.

Of the particle accelerator exploding.

Of a life full of upheaval and fear and uncertainty and danger.

She could live here in a place where she'd been happy and it was calm and safe and quiet, and maybe she could be happy again.

She'd left her phone in the kitchen. It buzzed against the counter as she drifted in, which was the only reason she remembered to pick it up. Texts stacked up on the screen. Cisco, Barry, Iris.

Cisco: _U ok? How was the funeral? Need kitten videos?_

Barry: _Hope the funeral wasn't awful. Want me to come help with anything?_

Iris: _I'm thinking about you today. Call if you want to talk_

She put it down again and drifted back out of the kitchen.

She found herself in front of the wall of pictures, staring at one. It was a Halloween party in the seventies, maybe. Her aunt stood, arms linked with two other women. They were all dressed in elaborate gowns from different eras.

"Princesses," little Caitlin had said happily once she was big enough to notice the picture.

Her great-aunt had laughed. "Not princesses, shaineleh. You see the crowns? We were queens."

She'd met these women today. Older, plumper, bowed over instead of standing up straight, but with the same spirit in their eyes. "She was family," one of them had said to her. Janice Greer, maybe? "She didn't have much blood family, besides you and that mother of yours, but she was our family."

She found herself weeping finally, tears running hot and silent down her cheeks.

Aunt Rebecca had been her family, not because of blood, but because she'd made the effort to be there, to connect, to hold on. If Caitlin used her aunt's home to disconnect, to hide away, she'd be ignoring everything her aunt had ever taught her about love or family.

When she got hold of herself, she went back into the kitchen and picked up the phone. She read the texts again and thought, _How could I have ever thought of leaving them?_

She wrote back to everyone - **Funeral was all right. I have some things to sort out here, so I might be here a few more days.**

She looked around and breathed in deeply. She could just smell her aunt's hand lotion.

 **But I'll be back home next week.**

FINIS


End file.
